Event 1

  On Friday 10/28/16 I went to PCAD to see designer Christian Robinson. He is most known for being an illustrator for children's books. Some of these books made it onto the New York Times best sellers list. This is sort of ironic as Robinson says he was not the biggest fan of books as a child. What he was really into was drawing. He also said that he didn't have the best mother but rather was raised mostly by his grandmother.

  He attended CALARTs were he studied animation. He unfortunately found out that animation was very hard. He didn't like the process of animation as he did the art that went into animation. He really liked the art direction of Walt Peregoy, Mary Blair, and Eyvend Carle. He also liked the experimental direction of Corolin Leaf and Yuri Norstein. He was also into the children illustration style of Ezra Jack Keats, Roger Davidson, and Leo Lionni. After tellings us about his inspirations, he explained Albert Einstein's quote that says the secret of creativity is to hide your sources.

  He then showed off some of his work from college. One of these works was an animation called the Dinosaur Song. He then took his portfolio to PIXAR in order to get an internship. He started working for the product merchandising department of PIXAR. The movie Up was the current project for PIXAR when he was working there so he started to make posters, lunch boxes and other products featuring the movie's characters.

  He the went on to tell us that he worked odd jobs for 2-3 years after his internship with PIXAR ended. He went on to say that he would often us sticky notes to write down feedback so that he could improve and learn from his mistakes. Eventually he was hired to be the illustrator for the book Last Stop on Market Street  which he brought an unique art style to, which was believe to aid in the books success. The success of this best seller opened up a lot of opportunity for him to illustrate more books. One of these books was called School's First Day of School. A fan of his work got really upset about that fact that a janitor character was black. This fan was really upset about this because he thought it was sending a message saying that black people could only work blue collar jobs. After this feedback he realized that children's book are sort of lacking in diversity and believed that this needs to be changed. Now he tries to add diversity in his work.

 

Week 15A

Week 14B and outside class

After adding in the majority of the text I decided to add some images. Some of them are photos from the Kickstarter page reused to fit the website. I think these still need a little more work, because the area I have the images in take too much space, look at the pink backgrounds. I also researched, but didn't yet implement, different font pairings.

Week 14A

After getting the layout completely blocked out, I decided to add in the content. To better fit some of the content I decided to change some of the areas.